Possible Fossil On Mars At The Foot of Mount Shar

Meh, it's more fun to contemplate a fossil of some sort.

Pretty cool picture irregardless of what it may, or may not,be. All the more reason for us to GO!!

Who knows what may, or, again, may not, have lived, and died on Mars? The only way we'll ever truly know is to go and see for ourselves.

Shotgun!!

a reply to: seagull

I agree, it can be a lot of fun to contemplate and hypothesise. I'd say that if there were ever any reptiles or birds on Mars, there would also have been forests and other vegetation. That vegetation would have eventually formed oil and coal deposits in the ground, and some of it would have been detectable from orbit. But of course we haven't detected any so far. In all depictions of Mars in its wet past, the land is vegetation-free, aka the "desert planet" with some seas and lakes.

Mars lost its global magnetic field and most of the atmosphere pretty early in its existence, perhaps just a couple of billions of years after it formed. Going by how evolution happened on Earth, it takes billions of years for even simple single-celled life to appear and to evolve into primitive multicellar organisms. If there ever was any life on Mars, we'd be lucky to find some fossilised bacteria or fungi.



Anyhoo, the upcoming NASA missions will "look" deep into the martian surface from orbit, and deploy a rover with astrobiological equipment to look for signs of past life. www.nasa.gov...

Swamp gas, I mean, Venus, um no, it looks like a rock with either possibly a fossil or not.

a reply to: SLAYER69

...and that about covers it, I think.

Right in the face of ongoing political thread's which none of us can stand let's revive this one as it is interesting after all even if there are those of you that do not agree with it's observation's and interpretation's (yet it is interesting even to you as you are posting your own argument's against so it keep's your attention as well),.

There are many object's which could easily be exo paleontological in nature upon mars and even some that many of us myself included are absolutely certain are artifact in nature though I have seen very few that categorize in that manner on the rover images and my interest is the larger artifact's seen by Voyager (before the MARS OBSERVER conveniently switched off it's transceiver and performed it's real mission of wrecking the face agree or not that is my stance and I believe that to be the case, what is more it is a mission that patently failed though it did cause catastrophic damage to the artifact and cause half of it to slide down in a land slide, I suspect it, either the real Observer or the Switcheroo was carrying a nuclear device for this mission - the real OBSERVER probe was probably carted off and buried somewhere or dismantled and disposed of at area 51 - and the damage was probably caused by an air burst above the artifact rather than a crust cracker type impact www.abovetopsecret.com... ).

But let's get back on track, Could there be evidence of earlier life in the solar system and could it have left traces on world's other than earth.

Possibly YES, Could the human race itself be older than it is assumed to and/or could human antecedent's or human like being's in the past have even dwelt not only on these other world's but also upon the earth.

Now there was a period in which the earth was all but uninhabitable, perhaps even the earth was the then toxic world and that was not the most likely to actually be inhabited and this period was between 2.2 to about 700 or even just 600 million years ago a period known as the snow ball earth period? (though life even multi-cellular life did appear several time's before during this snow ball earth period probably during inter-glacial periods), think Hoth from the empire strike's back but with a mostly toxic atmosphere.

news.nationalgeographic.com...
content.usatoday.com...-O6hygrKUk
www.dailymail.co.uk...

So the earth was not the nice place to live, that does not mean that there was no life here or indeed that prior to the snow ball earth period there had never been life on earth though but we have no CHEMICAL evidence to suggest there was, argument's against complex life though are flawed as they are based on analysis of ancient atmospheric (or believed to be atmospheric) gas trapped in rock or in chemical layers in rock and of course was that rock even at the surface so is that analysis correct, I would suggest probably not but it is all the data we have so it is all we can go on and there is the conundrum on that matter.

So what about other planet's IN the solar system.

Well it just so happen's that there is another world and it is not actually Mars but our other neighbour Venus that was probably a balmy, much cooler and potentially even habitable world during this period.
www.space.com...

It is all about temperature, the sun gain's in brightness, heat and temperature about variably but roughly at about 10 percent every billion years and at this juncture of about 700 million years ago (note the date the same period the earth warmed up enough to finish off the planetary glaciation) it became too hot for Venus to survive boiling it's ocean's into it's atmosphere where the water was broken down into it's component hydrogen and oxygen and the hydrogen then bled off out of the atmosphere and causing a terrible runaway green house effect, SO on a solar system scale the Goldilox zone around the star moved outward into a higher solar orbit moving the earth further into it and Venus further into the hot part of it and it is continuing to do so even today as our planet heat's up from Solar radiation increasing over time so that in about a billion to a billion and a half years the earth will become just like Venus is today, a hot greenhouse planet too hot to survive (though Mars though lacking an atmosphere will have a second chance).

Now what about MARS, well planets also have a warming planetary core that over time cool's, Mars core is now far too cool to warm it's surface and also the planet show's clear sing's of a terrible cataclysm that may have dealt it the death blow, the olympus monze feature itself may be on the diametrically opposite side to a massive asteroid or cometary impact which may have dealt this death blow to the planet (the impact throwing the semi liquid core with such force against the other side of the planet that the giant feature was formed in a very short space of time), so even with it's already cooled and by then very small core fatally disrupted and the massive outgassing and eruption which caused the Olympus monze feature to form the core was probably essentially killed at this point so the planet could not recover from the impact, the magnetic field became so shattered that it then failed to protect the atmosphere and the increased solar wind as the sun warmed up and grew brighter not only killed Venus and ended the snow ball Earth period but finally stripped off the remaining atmoshere of Mars, with it's core dead the planet would also have cooled much faster.


Now little of this can be proven and is subjective speculation but what if a HUMAN race had existed, maybe they even reached that world near proxima centuri and mutated into pale skinned large eye's small humanoid's whom spent most of there lives in controlled environment's though periodically they monitor there original home solar system and the survivor's they left behind around the neighbouring and far less predictable yellow dwarf star called sol.

Just a thought for the day.

Interesting picture of a Snake in that photo and it looks alive

www.chron.com...

originally posted by: stonerwilliam
Interesting picture of a Snake in that photo and it looks alive

How can it look alive in a still image?

originally posted by: ArMaP

originally posted by: stonerwilliam
Interesting picture of a Snake in that photo and it looks alive

How can it look alive in a still image?

It would be hanging straight down if it were dead or it could be a branch

originally posted by: stonerwilliam
It would be hanging straight down if it were dead or it could be a branch

Do snakes get in a straight line before dying?

a reply to: ArMaP

i would imagine so when hanging straight down , but ont quote me on that

a reply to: stonerwilliam

Wouldn't it fall?

originally posted by: ArMaP
a reply to: stonerwilliam

Wouldn't it fall?

It might if it were dead ,But alive it could be sslllliitthhering along

Defenetly a interesting picture from mars

That 'snake' photo is great. Surely anyone is going to have a hard time arguing that it's a rock formation. (I mean, we have to assume it's a rock formation, but it's damn hard to work out how it's possible).

On an earlier point (wildespace, replying to seagull), all the evidence we have here on Earth indicates that life arose almost immediately as soon as the conditions were more favourable than they were unfavourable. This has been revised several times, as newer fossil finds have pushed the 'start' date further and further back.

We're now at the stage where evolutionary biologists are starting to claim that evolution must have happened faster in the old single-cell days, because there wasn't enough time after the Earth became inhabitable for life to have arisen by the mechanisms we now understand!

For perspective, the Earth is supposed to be approx 4.5bn years old, was utterly uninhabitable (due to being largely molten) until 4bn years ago, and life is estimated to be 3.8bn years old. Which is sort of like a cosmic hole-in-one.

If this had happened just once in Earth's history that would be fair enough, but we've gone through a few planet-sized disasters since then, and every single time life has sprung back to cover the planet. We know about the dinosaurs, but that was chicken feed. For example, 200m years before the dinosaurs nearly everything on Earth was wiped out by the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which killed off around 95 per cent of all life forms.

And before that, but in the last 1bn years, the planet froze over so completely that only the tops of the highest mountains would have been visible on the surface of the ice. It did this four times in total. And life bounced back every time.

Anyway, I'm getting carried away. The point of this is that if life on this planet is any guide (and it's the only one we've got) something as disastrous as what happened to Mars wouldn't be enough to kill all lifeforms. And what were left would soon evolve to take advantage of conditions.

TL;DR - if life ever arose on Mars, the chances are good that it's still hanging on in some shape or form.

a reply to: Discotech

Actually, the 'enhance' stuff has come farther in the last two years than ever before.

They essentially use algorithms now to interpret what the resolution would look like at higher quality.

a reply to: Discotech

Actually, the 'enhance' stuff has come farther in the last two years than ever before.

They essentially use algorithms now to interpret what the resolution would look like at higher quality.

There is a company that boasts it can turn any YouTube video into 1080p.

originally posted by: audubon
For example, 200m years before the dinosaurs nearly everything on Earth was wiped out by the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which killed off around 95 per cent of all life forms.

Even if the Earth lost 95% of all life forms that's not the same as life having to start from zero again, there's a big difference.

The point of this is that if life on this planet is any guide (and it's the only one we've got) something as disastrous as what happened to Mars wouldn't be enough to kill all lifeforms.

If.

originally posted by: imjack
Actually, the 'enhance' stuff has come farther in the last two years than ever before.

They essentially use algorithms now to interpret what the resolution would look like at higher quality.

That's not really possible, as nobody can know what a grey pixel would look like if it was four pixels. Would it be four grey pixels? Two white and two black? Two dark grey and two light grey? Etc.

There is a company that boasts it can turn any YouTube video into 1080p.

Video is different, as they can use the slight changes from frame to frame to find a little more detail, but not much more.

originally posted by: ArMaP
Even if the Earth lost 95% of all life forms that's not the same as life having to start from zero again, there's a big difference.

Well, that's partly my point about life being incredibly resilient. The Permian-Triassic disaster is still unidentified (there are lots of possible causes, and it may have been more than one of them), but whatever happened it wasn't just a minor bottleneck and a bit of a setback.

One of the few ascertainable facts about the event is that the average temperature of the planet's oceans reached 40 degrees celsius! So you're looking at a more or less sterile ocean that covers far more land than even the worst current global warming prediction, because with an average of 40c there aren't any icecaps left.

Oh and the oceans are suddenly full of dissolved (poisonous, flammable, corrosive) hydrogen sulfide too. This is believed to have been related to the almost total disappearance of free oxygen from the atmosphere and its replacement with carbon dioxide (quite like Mars's atmosphere, in that respect, but thicker).

Life didn't attain anything like its previous abundance for at least 20m years after that.

But you're right. Even this isn't quite bad enough to qualify as anything like total obliteration and starting from scratch.

The 'snowball Earth' episodes are the best fit. You really are talking about absolutely everything being killed except some very simple extremophile creatures clustered around a very limited number of deep-ocean volcanic vents. The ocean is frozen to its very depths, there's no light, no oxygen getting through. There is nothing left for anything to live off, except minerals and heat. This is probably as close to a 'factory reset' that the planet has come. Four consecutive factory resets, in which life had to come back from just a handful of utterly basic ancestors before being wiped out again and again.

Sorry for going on about this. I find the subject of life's apparent indestructibility completely fascinating.

originally posted by: audubon
The 'snowball Earth' episodes are the best fit.

I never heard about that, could you post some reference for that?

Thanks in advance.

Wikipedia has a long article on it, but as usual it's confusing to read because the wikipedians have tried to cover everything, every angle, and every possible theory about what happened before, during, and after.

But it definitely happened. Evidence of equatorial glaciation has been found to confirm it.

This website has a range of resources, some fairly technical, but this page is a good summary:

www.snowballearth.org...

There's a good article here, about running experiments to recreate the conditions at the time: www.space.com...

Key quote:

In both sets of experiments, the land was barren. The presence or absence of plants affects the reflectivity, or albedo, of a planet, which in turn feeds into how fast it heats up. "Plants on land didn't show up until about 460 million years ago," Sohl said. "At best, there might have been some lichens or something like that on land, but that's really controversial."